On the margins of the June 14 NATO summit in Brussels, U.S. President Joe Biden is set to hold his first meeting with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The encounter comes at a sensitive time for Erdogan, whose country is teetering on the edge of a potentially catastrophic economic and political crisis. And Biden should use that to the United States’ advantage as he seeks to support democracy in Turkey.

The most likely outcomes from the American withdrawal are bad. The worst-case-scenarios are catastrophic.

There’s much more that can be said about the decision and the process (or lack thereof) behind it. But given how unlikely the decision is to be reversed, it is worth considering what will happen to Afghanistan after the last American troops leave.

The proposed missile upgrade program saves money and deters nuclear war. While critics are right to note that the United States' current missiles are increasingly expensive to maintain, the answer is to act to modernize now before the costs increase even further, not to reduce this critical leg of the nuclear triad. Moreover, the redundancies of the three legs of the nuclear triad are there by design, ensuring the United States maintains its defense without risking an accidental nuclear strike.

On this episode of the DefAero Report Daily Podcast, sponsored by Bell, Amb. Eric Edelman, a former US ambassador to Turkey who is now a counselor at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, Amb. John Evans, a former US ambassador to Armenia, and Eugene Rumer, the director of the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, discuss the combined Turkish-Azerbaijani assault on the Armenian enclave of Nagorno Karabakh.

When Secretary of State Rex Tillerson arrives in Ankara on Thursday, he will find Turkey unrecognizable as the ostensibly Muslim democracy and close ally that U.S. officials once held up as a model for the Islamic world. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is poised to complete his long transformation of Turkey from a raucous -- if imperfect democracy -- to an autocracy, one ruled by caprice and fear.

President Trump’s latest quick-fix approach to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) on Iran’s nuclear program creates an untenable policy dilemma. Because the deal sacrificed significant U.S. leverage upfront, right now there is currently little Congress can accomplish singlehandedly in trying to strengthen it, and much the administration would place at risk in abruptly leaving it.